React Applications Built to Stay Maintainable

Plain React is fine for an authenticated app behind a login, where SEO is irrelevant and every user is loading the same shell anyway. Next.js earns its complexity when pages must be crawlable, when first paint matters commercially, or when you want server-side data fetching per request. A prerendered Vite build is a lighter third option for mostly-static sites.

Almost always, and rarely by sprinkling memoisation. The usual causes are re-render cascades from badly scoped state, unvirtualised long lists, and bundles that ship far more than the page needs. We profile before changing anything, because the slow part is frequently not the part people suspect.

Start by separating server state from client state — a data-fetching library for the former handles most of what people reach for a global store to solve. After that, the remaining client state is usually small enough that built-in React state plus a light store is enough. Reaching for a heavy solution first is how React apps get complicated.

Only if the HTML contains the content. A default client-rendered React app ships an empty root element, which Google can render but other crawlers and social preview scrapers will not. Server rendering or prerendering fixes it — and it's worth checking, because sites lose rankings to this without realising.

Yes, and we start by reading it and reporting honestly on what we find before proposing changes. Most inherited React apps need targeted work in a few places rather than the rewrite people expect.